Wellington Film Society

The WFS committee have cast their votes and we have a dozen films on our "must-see" list for NZIFF in 2016. It's fair to say we're a broad church when it comes to taste in cinema and our list is reflective of this. At the top of our list is the film brimming with Cannes buzz, Toni Erdmann but equally anticipated is the darkly comic and dystopian High-Rise (nothing to do with the Hiddleston factor...). It will come as no surprise that we're particularly excited about the very strong selection of films in the Retrospective section, with a shout-out to A Touch of Zen, a film we're very proud to co-present at this year's Festival. The rest of our list reflects genre favourites, auteur-driven cinema and women in strong roles. What is clear is that we're going to watch a heck of a lot of films over the 17 days of the Festival and we can't wait for it to kick-off.

Hailed at Cannes as a brilliantly original comic masterpiece, Austrian writer/director Maren Ade’s epic of parent-child dysfunction centres on a father assailing his uptight corporate daughter with crazy pranks.

Werner Herzog, director of such notable classics of the non-fiction realm as Grizzly Man, turns his inimitable eye on the galloping evolution of the internet, its geniuses and its ominous implications for creation at large.

Brazilian actress Sonia Braga has the role of her life in this engrossing and richly surprising portrait of a fiercely intelligent and independent woman fighting to save the apartment she loves from demolition.